Jinglei: click manipulation

Jinglei (惊雷) targets click manipulation — artificially inflating click-through and behavioural signals to lift ranking. It sits in Baidu’s “fair competition” group alongside the link-trading and hijacking algorithms, and it has been upgraded repeatedly, reaching 3.0.

What it covers

• Software and services that generate search clicks automatically.
• Recruiting real people to search a given query and click a given result. Using humans rather than bots does not change the classification.
• Providing the service to others — the supplier is exposed as much as the buyer.

Why this matters more in Baidu

Behavioural signals carry real ranking weight, and a large commercial market exists in China selling exactly this — “快排” fast-ranking services promising top positions within days. Jinglei is the countermeasure, and its repeated upgrades indicate how persistent the market is.

The contractor problem

The site carries the penalty for what an agency or a traffic vendor did on its behalf. A guarantee of a top-three position within a fixed number of days is not a service that can be delivered by legitimate optimisation; it is this. Asking a supplier in writing what generates the traffic they report is the only due diligence available, and the answer is usually revealing.

The signature in analytics

• Sessions arriving from search with near-identical durations.
• No scroll depth, no secondary page views, no conversions.
• Clustered device profiles and geography.
• Rising traffic with flat enquiries — the pattern that should always prompt a check.

Recovery

Stop the source, remove any module capable of generating it, and expect the algorithm to verify that the behaviour has not resumed. Because the signal is a pattern over time, a single clean week is not the standard: traffic has to normalise and stay normal.